You are currently browsing the Obama Care Blog Center weblog archives for the day 21. June 2009.
21. June 2009 by admin.
VA hospitals accidently expose 10,000 vets to HIV/Aids?Hepatitius
http://tinyurl.com/same-sex-reg
President Obama extends healthcare coverage to same-sex partners for Federal employees.
Bipartisn congressional group is calling for Obama and Pelosi to remove ‘reconciliation” from the table.
Karl Rove’s appeal to the GOP to make sure their plan satisfies the needs of families, small business, and the healthcare providers themselves. More importantly, the GOP must realize that healthcare in America IS fundamentally broken and requires reforms beyond lowering taxes and ‘allowing the free market’ to address the needs/
Meanwhile, the dems believe critics are using ’scare tactics’ to try to prevent ANY real healthcare reform.
Obama’s call for universal healthcare has been met with requests for examples of other successful universal, or single-payer healthcare systems. This far, he hasn’t produced a clear example.
http://tinyurl.com/lfwoplComing up this week is ABC’s special on healthcare, to be broadcast from the White House. Will it present ‘both’ sides (and are there only two sides)?
The strongest argument against universal healthcare is the government itself, citing the DMV, Conrail, the Post Office as examples of poorly run Federal ‘businesses’.
Karl Rove has been very active tweeting ObamaCare this week. Here he states that scrutiny will take ObamaCare down. The goal, however, of the GOP should not simply be to destroy ObamaCare, but to fix our broken system.
Senator Chris Dodd has been one of the loudest voices on the dem side in support of ObamaCare, using the argument most dems seem to be picking up:
a. the healthcare system is broken\
b. the only way to fix healthcare is with a single-payer system
c. We need to enact a single-payer healthcare system
One of the biggest impediments to ObamaCare is cost of implementation at a time when America has literally run out of money. The dems in congress are forming committees, working groups, etc to find less expensive ways to implement ObamaCare
Finally, The Nation debates National Review on healthcare. Their arguments are polar opposites, and once again assume we have only two choices, public coverage or free market solutions.
ObamaCare faces an uphill battle. The longer it takes to clearly articulate a plan, the harder it will be for the dems to sell the program. Efforts by the GOP to simply kill ObamaCare without fixing a fundamentally flawed system will only hurt all of us.
In the polar world that is Washington, we are not sure ObamaCare, in its full form, has a chance to pass. Rather, it may need to be implemented in stages. What is needed is a common sense approach to healthcare that Washington is incapable of utilizing as both sides are too busy trying to exploit the healthcare issue for purely political gain.
When dems accuse the GOP of having NO ideas, or NO GOOD ideas, they are demagoging and attempting to demonize the opposition. This is hardly a constructive way to seriously develop a plan that will genuinely fix our crumbled system.
When the GOP cries out against any and all forms of govt healthcare management, lauding the free market system, they fail to miss the point that healthcare is NOT, nor should it be, a business. They demagogue the other side when they portray the debate to be simply between govt ownership and the purity of the so-called free market.
Paul Collier
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